the ramble dump

Rather brilliantly manipulated from the original by Amelia.

There is lots of stuff I want to talk about regarding this chapter. There's also lots I can't talk about just yet. I don't want to ruin things. But, as far as the stuff I can talk about goes, a good place to start would perhaps be with custard.

The custard fight is an idea we had very early on. Curiously enough, it was originally going to be some kind of pillow fight. Then later we decided on pirates when it started to look like pillow fights would, unfortunately, not be an option.

We approached writing the café sequence slightly differently to how we normally do. Usually we each work on different threads of the story, and most of the time this a better way of doing it because it gives us both more space to explore our own ideas, but for this sequence in this chapter we tried the old method of writing a bit and passing it to the other person, who then writes a bit and passes it back and so on, both editing it as we went along. Although there was some petulance from both parties over various points, I think for the most part it worked. It was fun to see in which direction it went and helped to add to the spontaneity of the sequence, especially with there being so much going on at the same time. It's definitely something we could try again.

As for 'Cuisino Royale', that actually started out as the title of an email I sent to Amelia containing the Stat and Andromed kitchen scene, with 007 signifying, of course, Chapter 7, and then we realised that, what with the lengthy action sequence and custard fight and all, the name was becoming more and more appropriate. So we've used it as a selling point.

For a long time the pirates and the custard fight were just 'a thing to happen next'. But since July, we started making sudden and extreme progress in deciding where the plot was going, and this soon gave way to something much, much bigger. These past few months, the progress we've made can only be described as it is on Amelia's website:

the most intense starcustard chapters yet... { in deeper than we thought }

The first big story arc, as you might have started to notice with the fade-in/fade-out sequence at the start of this chapter, is coming to an end. Although we've always had some very vague idea of future points in the story since we started it, the story (or stories) we've been following so far have for a long time been the only thing we've had. But what we now have planned is so much bigger than anything yet, and even what we had as those vague future points have been swallowed up by the avalanche of ideas that we've both suddenly found ourselves in. And so have the pirates.

There is, like I said, lots I want to talk about. But I can't. And although we've almost been breaking our brains trying to sort it all out, much to our amazement, I think we sort of have. And it's been hard for me to contain my excitement, feeling fully the need to talk about it like it is the biggest thing ever to happen. Starcustard, we feel, is now on the brink of something massive.

Labels: pirates, starcustard

# posted by Chris @ 11:26 PM